Writer’s choice

2996228_confederates_in_the_attic_essay_assignment_1 2996228_although_it_is_expected_that_students_already_know_the_particulars_of_college_level_writing_2 x2996228_turnitin_originality_report_329623248_6.html

While Americans cling to the Civil War, they’ve forgotten most of the rest of their history. There is no comparable obsession with the Mexican War, the War of 1812, or even the American Revolution. Create an essay where you discuss some of the reasons for this, as stated by the author’s stories. ? Horwitz meets many women who are as devoted as men to memory of the War: Sue Curtis, June Wells, Melly Meadows, Mauriel Joslyn. How does their approach to the War differ from that of men in the book? ? Many Southern whites revere the rebel battle flag as a symbol of the valor and sacrifice of their ancestors. To many African-Americans, the same flag is a hated symbol of segregation and white supremacy. Create an essay that discusses this topic with examples from stories in the book: Is there any middle ground? Which of the states in the South have navigated this minefield most successfully? ? Horwitz writes about the killing of Michael Westerman while flying a Confederate flag from his truck, in Todd County, Kentucky. What are the social and emotional reasons why Westerman’s killing becomes such a flashpoint for Southern anger, both black and white? ? The subtitle to Horwitz’s book is “Dispatches from the unfinished civil war.” In what ways is the war unfinished, according to the stories noted in the book?

CONFEDERATESIN THE ATTIC ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Essay Parameters:

1. 4 pages (minimum).

2. Double spaced.

3. Written in college level English.

4. Uploaded to Turnitin via the link in this folder on the due date (see Syllabus).

6. 12 pt font

7. 1 inch margins

8. Must have a developed thesis statement that is followed by the information provided in the paper.

9. Quotes and cited paraphrasing are good for this kind of paper!

10. Cite where in the book your details come from. This includes quotes, facts, or any borrowed material.

11. MLA or Chicago format are fine for this essay.

CHOOSE ONE OF THE TOPICS BELOW

 While Americans cling to the Civil War, they’ve forgotten most of the rest of their history.
There is no comparable obsession with the Mexican War, the War of 1812, or even the

American Revolution. Create an essay where you discuss some of the reasons for this, as

stated by the author’s stories.

 Horwitz meets many women who are as devoted as men to memory of the War: Sue
Curtis, June Wells, Melly Meadows, Mauriel Joslyn. How does their approach to the War

differ from that of men in the book?

 Many Southern whites revere the rebel battle flag as a symbol of the valor and sacrifice
of their ancestors. To many African-Americans, the same flag is a hated symbol of

segregation and white supremacy. Create an essay that discusses this topic with

examples from stories in the book: Is there any middle ground? Which of the states in

the South have navigated this minefield most successfully?

 Horwitz writes about the killing of Michael Westerman while flying a Confederate flag
from his truck, in Todd County, Kentucky. What are the social and emotional reasons why

Westerman’s killing becomes such a flashpoint for Southern anger, both black and

white?

 The subtitle to Horwitz’s book is “Dispatches from the unfinished civil war.” In what
ways is the war unfinished, according to the stories noted in the book?

How will your paper be graded? Here is the rubric!

 Full Credit (A Level)
 Written completely in college level English with few grammatical mistakes.
 Numerous relevant details demonstrating mastery of material.
 A clear thesis that is supported by the paper’s structure.
 Paper’s structure is apparent: Intro, Body, Conclusion.
 Sources properly referenced by in-paper citations: (Horowitz: 23)
 Bibliography is present and professional in style.

 Half Credit (B-C Level)
 College-level written response
 Relatively complete. Thesis is present, but paper does not follow it, or the thesis is vague, leaving

little guidance.
 Writing is vague with relatively view supporting details.
 Most of the borrowed material is referenced, but some paraphrased or borrowed material not cited.
 Bibliography is present and fairly correct. Websites cited show only a URL and not a full reference.

 Less than Half Credit (D Level)
 No thesis, or clear paper organization.
 Virtually no supporting details; mostly broad generalities.
 More than ten grammatical mistakes, and spelling errors, including such interchanges of similar words

like “there‟ for “their‟
 Lack of formal and correct English with the use of “I, we, us, our, you,‟ or “didn’t, wouldn’t, isn’t”
 Sporadic citing of sources.
 Demonstrates unsatisfactory level of understanding of reading material.

 No Credit (F Level)
 Not college-level discourse; incoherent, extremely poor grammar, rambling.
 Fails to respond to the question prompts or response is largely wrong and unsupported.
 Contains very few details from the reading.
 No sources are cited, leading the reader to judge the paper as plagiarized or made-up.

Althoughit is expected that students already know the particulars of college level writing, sometimes converting a topic into a great thesis statement can be a bit of a challenge! Below are some steps to take to help get your thesis statement ready for your Essay:

.

.

Thesis Statement Formulation:

A thesis is a statement that clearly lays out a topic of research and discusses the main point(s) to be made by the research. A thesis is not a summary of a question or a basic sentence of fact, but is an argument that can be proven by the evidence gained by your research.

.

The Thesis Tests:

1. Is this a complete sentence (and not a question)?

2. Does it have an opposing argument?

3. Is every word clear and unambiguous in meaning?

4. Will the thesis require proof from the book to prove it? (If so, then good job!!!)

5. Does the statement make such a large claim that the writer has no hope of proving it to be true in the space of this assignment? If so, go back and check the question you are trying to answer, and revise your thesis to make your main points clear and specific.

.

Remember: A thesis will often require adjustment after the paper is written! What you intend to prove may be different from what actually is proven when the paper is done. Be sure to go back and be sure your thesis matches your body of evidence and your conclusion.

Please date it on 5/5/2013

Turnitin Originality Report

Confederate essay

by Armita Namiranian

From Confederates! (HIST 20 – Amer Hist to 1870)

• Processed on 13-May-2013 7:51 AM PDT
• ID: 329623248
• Word Count: 1208

 
Similarity Index
31%

Similarity by Source
Internet Sources:
31%

Publications:
0%

Student Papers:
0%

sources:

1

24% match (Internet from 01-Aug-2008)

http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/projects/conattic.htm

2

8% match (Internet from 02-Dec-2011)

http://www.newton.k12.ma.us/nshs/library/SummerReading/2009/AnnotSeniorSumRdg09.htm

paper text:

Armita Namiranian 05/08/2013 Dispatches from unfinished civil war The Pulitzer Prize winner Horwitz took an eye-opening journey in Southern part of America, where his childhood fascination with Confederacy collides was with hard adult certainty about culture and race in America. Having been brought up in Virginia, Horwitz decorated rebel heroes on his attic bedroom walls. After a decade of covering foreign wars, Horwitz returned home and launched a one year ramble through a landscape of the Civil War; he travelled from Virginia to the Alabama searching for explanations for America’s continuous interest in conflict. He accompanied the hard-core re-enactor, who was obsessed with authenticity. The re-enactor specialty that is “bloating” in the imitation of a corpse, putted Horwitz in demand with filmmakers and artists on, “Civil Wargasm” the whirlwind seven-day journey of battlegrounds. Horwitz visited Shelby Foote together with lesser known historians such as Jimmy Algiers, and eccentric storekeeper who folk museum sports the life- size figurine of the Robert E. Lee prepared from sheetrock. After trading notes with the park rangers, he discovered that a lot of what he knows is a myth and the fact is that the historical misrepresentation at the federally sustained battlefields is often abetted by confined boosters. One morning Horwitz was awakened by a crackle of the musket fire, and he started filing the front-line dispatches once more this time since the war in the home country, and were close to his heart (Horwitz 425). Horwitz childhood impressions of American heritage in civil war

1from his psyche relatively natural in the cultural context of the adulthood,

1Horwitz brings into this wild journey the tortured past and bewildering present the style and expertise he expended on the variety of assignments in different publications, since the Wall Street Periodical to The New Yorker and Harper’s. Horwitz remembered Robert Penn Warren’s remark, which grandsons experience the full imaginative appeal of civil war as a ritual of becoming American. Horwitz grandfather,

who was a Jew,

1came to America seventeen years after the Appomattox (Horwitz 435). He sensed that the history of civil war was the American Talmud to unlock his secrets of American his adopted country,

as well as making him become part of the history. In Connecticut,

1New Haven, he passed this to his own son who later passed it to Tony Horwitz. Tony reproduced images such as medieval illuminate, on his attic bedroom walls. After a period of

1nine years in different foreign countries, Horwitz went to Virginia, a place where he discovered that American are obsessed with war in different ways that motivated his own sunken memories of many photographs he studied when he was a child, activating his

1obsessions very severely that it made his Australian wife to refer to him as

“civil war bore”. Horwitz plotted his own hardcore campaign against civil war one night after pondering on civil war obsession. His aim

1was to spend about a year on civil war, searching for people and

place with memory of conflict alive in current days (Arnold and Roberta 108). Horwitz traveled to the Western Southern and Eastern states where the big battles waged, as well as

1pictured in the etchings his grandfather revealed to him through the magnifying glass. Horwitz power to magnify the emotional impact,

as well as the importance

1of details evolved from childhood to a skill that is enjoyable to watch. At Monument Avenue in the Richmond, for example, he had this insight

that he could not think of any other

1city in the world, which lined its avenues with stone leviathans reverencing failed rebels against the state. Horwitz’s re-enactor comrade Rob took him on what

Rob referred to as the civil Wargasm. Rob told Horwitz that his true calling is a civil war bum. By experiencing what Rob referred to as “period rush” Horwitz became captive of the past. Several chapters later, Horwitz confessed that he could not glance at a calendar without attaching the parallel dates since the 1860s (Arnold and Roberta 109). Horwitz was

1myriad- minded through temperament, however, even his comrade was single-minded exhibited it in behavior and speech at each turn of twisted road in the past. Rob explained how he evolved along the two paths, and became what he is

currently. Roving at the speed soldiers of the civil war never imagined over consecrated places to make an impression to

1Horwitz with accounts of heroic times, Rob consumed fables and facts of the war.

Horwitz wielded

1humor as the shield against the hydra-headed monster of the obsession, at the end it failed to save him. Horwitz felt nearly no ideological relationship with the unreconstructed rebels

he realized that these rebels were right. The matters at hand in civil war particularly remained unresolved and raw. Horwitz journey made him understand obsession of others, although he felt strangely not able to explain.

1As a persistent qualifier to the underlying purpose, which could not be serious, Horwitz humor

cause

1effect of the luring and later lulling to readers who thought preoccupation with civil war is ludicrous. Such readers came from Horwitz’s battleground sight more open than they were before to probable ways of feeling and seeing the relevance of war to their

lived (Kingseed 104). In Virginia State, Horwitz joined the band of the ‘hardcore’ re-enactors who were involved in crash-diet in order

2to achieve a hollow-eyed view of starved Confederates. In the Kentucky, Horwitz witnessed Klan rallies, as well as calls for the race war ignited by killing of the white man who brandished the rebel flag. At the Andersonville, Horwitz found that the commander of the prison was executed

in the claim that he was a war criminal, and currently he is exalted as a hero and martyr. In the climax of the book,

2Horwitz takes the marathon trek from the Antietam to Gettysburg and finally to Appomattox together with the Robert Lee Hodge, an unconventional pilgrim who named their odyssey ‘Civil Wargasm’

(Kingseed 105).

2Propelled by the boyhood passion for Civil War, Tony embarked on the search for people and places still detained in the thrall through the America’s greatest conflict.

This journey resulted into

2an adventure for the soul of Unvanquished south, a lace where ghosts of Lost Cause were resurrected through remembrance and ritual. Horwitz

visited many sites throughout the South; he encountered the unreconstructed rebels who practiced the outdated beliefs. Horwitz met groups of re-enactors devotees who tried to relive the experience of soldier’s death and life. He brings to live old battlefields, as well as new courts, classrooms,

2country bars, where previous and present collide, and often in the explosive ways.

One of the Horwitz most disheartening but yet unsurprising realizations are the attitudes towards civil war that divided people along racial lines. A majority of whites covered the memory in the nostalgia, and refused to search beneath the myth, whilst most blacks dismissed the civil war as worthless to them and to their current existence. Work Cited Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Internet resource. Arnold, James R, and Roberta Wiener. American Civil War: The Essential Reference Guide. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2011. Print. Kingseed, Cole C. The American Civil War. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2004. Print.